Dual booting Linux and fail

Hello Steemit,

Today I installed a Linux distribution for the first time on dual boot. I have used Windows my whole life and haven’t really had any problems with it ever. I do like running things as I want myself though.

For example, I always preferred Android to IOS since it offered more freedom. Having owned one iPhone and not liking it one bit made the decision easy for future purchases. But even with the freedom Android gives you I still decided to root my phones up until now. For those that don’t know “rooting” is when you gain “superuser” access to the phone and also access to the root directory. This allows you to make changes to the phone that you normally wouldn’t be able to do. Like installing software from other sources than the Play Store and also more advanced changes to the kernel for example. You also get the possibility to install “Custom Roms” on the phone which I really like. At the moment I’m running Superman-Rom for Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. I think these can give you better performance, better battery life and a completely different phone experience with the correct configurations.

Back to Linux. I first really tried out Linux at my internship and I started to like it fast. I googled for tutorials and terminal commands and started learning. Once I had the basics at hand I really started liking it. Unfortunately I didn’t get to use it too much so I continued using Windows for the most part. Now that the internship was over, I decided to install it for myself and play around a little.

Problem was I didn’t want to try it out on my own gaming PC if something were to happen. But I knew my brother had a laptop laying around so I asked to borrow it for a little “experiment”.

I started off looking for a USB stick to get the bootable media on. Sadly I did not find one so i had to get creative. Well actually just googled around a bit and found this awesome app for Android called DriveDroid. It allows you to boot your PC from ISO files that you have stored on your phone. So i had a solution to my problem, I could use my phone to boot Linux on my computer and dual boot it with Windows.

I still had to choose a distribution of Linux to use and after reading about the different ones I decided on Mint. I had tried Fedora and just thought I’d try something else while I’m at it. So I transferred the ISO file for Mint to my phone and restarted my PC.

In BIOS I forced the boot from the media that the app had made and started the installation. After I had had some problems with the installation i finally got it running. I was not impressed with it though. I continued having some problems with it so i decided to boot back into Windows. I was a little unsure about the partitioning I had done so I opened the Disk Manager and checked. To my surprise there were a lot more partitions then I remembered so I decided to clean up a bit. I was a little hasty though. I chose the ones that I thought definetly didn’t have the Linux on and removed them.

I had to decide on a new distribution and landed on Ubuntu this time. I downloaded the image for it and did the same thing with the DriveDroid app as last time. This time when I rebooted my PC I got a surprise….

This was the only thing I could see and I had no idea what to do or how to use it. Started googling a bit and fast enough i found out that I had removed my Linux and the bootloader GRUB that i also had installed. So now I had NO bootloader. Meaning I couldn’t boot any operative system. After a little while I finally got the Ubuntu live user launched and was able to restore the bootloader with a “grub-repair” command. I continued installing Ubuntu and finally I was happy. Bootloader was restored and I could finally boot both Windows and Linux successfully.

I continued with updates and configuring the desktop. Mainly by downloading the Cinnamon desktop environment and applying it. This is how it looks with Cinnamon:

I have used Linux for a whole day now and I’m really happy with it. There are some features that work a lot better then on Windows.

When I use Windows my speakers don’t work well, my audio jack for headphones doesn’t work at all. Both of those we’re working perfectly now. With “Alsamixer I could configure my speakers as I liked. Now they play really loud and good. And even the graphics drivers worked perfectly. I was playing Counter-Strike on it after only a couple of hours :D.

I am going to continue using Linux in the future and I recommend anyone to try it out themselves. But always be careful with backups and everything because as you can see here sometimes you can mess it up. Sometimes bad and sometimes chaos. Fortunately this time it wasn’t so bad. Although for a second there I thought I had broken my brothers computer for good.

I tried to explain everything I did so that it would be easily understandable and I hope it turned out that way! :D

Thanks for reading everyone I hope you enjoyed reading about my Linux adventure :D . Please let me know if there are any Linux users out there and if you have any good tips for a newbie!

I will post another game review as soon as I finish the game so remember to check that out and follow :)

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Peace out, Strawhat